Sunday Reading

New Delhi, 12 May 2010

Linking The Brain

CRUCIAL INSIGHTS ON ANVIL

By Suraj Saraf

Can people’s moral judgment be altered by disrupting a part of the brain? Possible, says a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).  

“During the transmission two people are hooked up to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. After the first person’s computer recognizes the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to other person’s PC.”  “It is not telepathy”, Dr. James said. “There is no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in other person’s mind”.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists were able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have major implications for judges and juries.

Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disrupted activity in the right temporietal junction or TPJ, which is usually highly active when we think about what we believe the outcome of a particular act will be. The researchers disrupted the TJP by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp and got study participants to read a series of scenarios posing moral conundrums.

Two experiments were conducted: during one, the participants were asked to judge the scenario’s characters after having magnetic impulses sent to their TPJs for 25 minutes, and in other they passed judgment while undergoing very short bursts of magnetic interference. In both the experiments, disrupting work differently, bilingualism and, in fact, multi-linguist, is the norm in the Indian subcontinent. According to recent studies bilinguals have cognitive benefits that extend from childhood into old age, for instance addressing the aging related diseases such as dementia.

According to another study, British scientists are reported to have created a system for “brain to brain communication,” a development researchers claim will allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others.

The system developed at the British University of Southampton, had been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a revolutionary way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.

It was claimed that the technology, the first of its kind, would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability. “This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who cannot speak, cannot even blink,” said the lead scientist Dr. Christopher James.

However, he cautioned that his experiments were “the first baby steps” towards technologies that would allow people instantly to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others.

In this study, scientists used “brain computer interfacing”, a technique that allowed computers to analyze brain signals that enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signal through an internet connection to another person’s brain miles away.

Because of its extremely complex structure, the brain still remains the most defiant part of the body regarding its working. No wonder, therefore, that there is worldwide research going on over the brain and every new finding concerning that is lapped up by the world media.

Recently communist leader Jyoti Basu’s brain after his death had been acquired by the Indian National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences. Some years back the brain of renowned scientist Einstein had been researched by a Canadian research institute four decades after his death. Research on various aspects of the brain otherwise is also going on world-over. It would be of interest to underline here some new important facts which have surfaced.  

A study published in the Psychological Science Journal of the Association of Psychological Science Bangalore had highlighted that those children who know two languages more easily solve problems than others. That they process words faster than others. It also revealed that knowledge of second languages, even one learned in adolescence, affects how people read in their native language. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.

The brain of those who knew the dual language processed the dual language words more quickly than words found only in their native tongue. The study shows further that even when a person is reading in his or her native language, there is influence of knowledge of the non-dominant second language.

The study showed further that the ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts. It also demonstrates that their brains normal neural activity in the right TPJ switched off the part of people’s moral judgment mechanism that look at the protagonist’s beliefs.

In a British study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation etc, the researchers found that the roads linking the two crucial areas of the brain viz dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision making, have faulty connections riddled with “potholes”, while those of the non-psychopaths these connections were in good shape.

The study opens up the possibility of developing treatment for dangerous psychopaths in future, said Dr. Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at London’s King’s College Hospital. “These were particularly serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illness,” he said. “Essentially what we found is that the connections in the psychopaths were not as good as the connections in the non-psychopaths. I would describe them as roads between the two areas – and we found that in the psychopaths, the roads had potholes and were not very well maintained.”

The scientists cautioned against suggestions that the study could lead screening of potential psychopaths criminals before they are able to commit crimes, saying their findings had not established how, when or why the brain links were damaged. “The most exciting question how… is when do the potholes come…. are people born with them, do they develop early in life, or are they a consequence of something else?” –INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)